The Cui Ruzhuo painting, titled “Snowy Mountain,” had garnered the second highest sale price, equivalent to $3.7 million, at the auction last Monday. The highest sale price of the auction was drawn by another work, “Landscape in Snow,” by the same artist. The latter sold for HK$184 million, or $23.7 million, according to Art Market Monitor. (View PDF of auction catalog.)

Poly Auction reported the loss to police on Tuesday, igniting an intensive hunt for the missing painting that involved landfill scouring as well as police review of closed-circuit video. On that video, according to a Wall Street Journal report, a packaged painting was thought to have been observed near a pile of trash that was later discarded.

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